Scheduling Posts On Twitter Via Tweetdeck; My Process

In the beginning of March I wrote a post titled Promoting Yourself In Social Media; My Personal Study. In that post I talked about how I was doing a lot of things to try to get myself noticed more. That’s because I knew I needed more traffic, and I wanted more people to recognize me as someone who might know something about blogging, social media, etc.

In that post I mentioned how things had been progressing for me, and a lot of it had to do with Twitter. At that time I mentioned that my traffic had gone up 15%. Right now I can tell you that, in a comparison of the period I compared to after my initial test that my traffic has gone up 100%; that means it’s doubled. Twitter is now my 4th largest referrer overall but my #1 referrer from social media; that’s pretty cool right?

Now, to be fair, that same progress hasn’t happened with my business blog, where traffic has actually come down, even though I’ve had lots of people adding me to lists on Twitter. However, for my business website, traffic had gone up 200%, or 3 times the level it had been before. A lot of that might have been due to the marketing I’ve been doing for my latest book Leadership Is/Isn’t Easy, which has the package available only 2 more days; after that I’m only selling the book on its own (gotta get that last plug in lol). Twitter is my #2 referrer; there you go!

Anyway, in that previous post I talked about scheduling posts but didn’t say how I was doing it or where I was getting my stuff from. I decided to talk about the process I go through and why I do it this way.

Obviously, I’ve already mentioned Tweetdeck in the title. There are lots of clients out there that people use to connect with Twitter. I was originally using Tweetdeck before Twitter bought it & changed it up. I fought using it for a while but realized that, overall, it still fit my needs best. More about that later.

The next thing I did for both this blog and my business blog was start with 15 to 20 posts that I thought highlighted myself best on the topics I initially wanted to be known for. For this blog it was blogging and social media; for my business blog it was leadership. I went through all of 2014 for these posts, but for my business blog I had to dip back into 2013 to find enough posts to get started, since, while I was on the road, sometimes I only wrote one post every couple of weeks on there.

The easiest way to capture the information you need after you select your articles to share is to use the social share buttons on your post (you’re using them right?) for Twitter and copy it into something like Notepad.

You’re doing this for two reasons. The first is that it’ll give you the title and the link, though you might have to remove your “via ‘yourname'” if you have it on there so you’re not tweeting yourself. The second is because you’re going to want to add hashtags to it. Add the hashtags before you move to the next step; a hint is to add the tag, and then add a space after it. I’ll tell you why in a minute.

Hashtags are a big deal when you’re trying to show yourself as an authority on a certain thing. It seems that not only do a lot of people specifically look for certain hashtags, but many of them have lists they’ve created so they can follow their favorite people on those topics. For this blog, most of the hashtags are either #blogging or #socialmedia (remember, never add spaces on a hashtag). For my business blog most of the hashtags are #leadership or #motivation.

You’re doing all of this up front so you don’t have to type it all out again, and it’ll be the beginning of your database. Yes, I said the beginning, as you’re just starting.

Next, I go into Tweetdeck. Before I go that far I want to mention that I notice a lot of people using a plugin called Tweet Old Post. In my opinion, either people are using it wrong or they don’t have the ability to set up the posts they want the way they want. Using my way, you have a lot more control over everything. Also, it’s possible you can do what I’m doing on other platforms; this is just the one I use.

What you do is go into Tweetdeck and act like I’m about to write an original tweet. Then I go to my file, highlight one post, copy it and paste it into the message window. The reason I put a space after the hashtag is because if it’s a common hashtag it’ll come up as being highlighted in the message window and you’ll have to go the extra step of having to push the spacebar. It might not seem like much but if you’re going to be doing it often, like me, eliminating a keystroke makes sense.

After pasting that in there you’ll want to go to “Schedule Tweet”. The reason we’re doing it this way is because you’re going to postdate all your sweets; in essence, you’re creating a schedule so that posts are going out all day, or multiple days, when you may or may not be around. You get to pick the date and the time, and it must be in the future. Once you’ve picked the date, if you’re going to do multiple posts for that date you don’t have to select it again until you’re going into a new day.

Here’s something I don’t do all that often with the posts but you can do it if you prefer. As long as what you put into the message window leaves you at least 22 characters, you can add an image, which is just above the Schedule Tweet bar. The reason I don’t do it with most posts is because the first image I’m using in the post is a Flickr Creative Commons image, and I don’t feel comfortable using someone else’s image. If the first image is something I own, then I may use it.

I space my articles out over a hour, and I base it on Eastern time. Every day I start at a slightly different time, anywhere between 9:30 and 9:55, in 5-minute increments. I usually go until between 11 PM and 11:25 at night. Every once in a while I’ll post something later in the evening/early morning, since I tend to stay up late.

My purpose for doing it this way is twofold. One, I get to select what I consider is the best of my articles. Two, Twitter is one of those places where you need to promote yourself more than once and often enough without being too much. It’s estimated that for the majority of people who are actually using Twitter a lot, a tweet might have impact for maybe 20 minutes… after that, it’s like it never existed with your audience.

This is how I started, but I haven’t stopped there. At this juncture my blog posts file is 15 pages, and I’ve moved it to Word. I’ve done that because I can highlight what post I want to start with the next day, or whenever I start the process again. You can’t do that in Notepad. Also, I can segregate the post between blogs easier in Word. I started with only the two blogs but I’ve added posts from some of my other blogs.

I also go back at least 4 years, but not further. Once again, I’ve done this for two reasons. The first is that some people don’t like reading old posts, even if the content is evergreen, so going back only 4 years pushes the boundary without overdoing it. The second is that I shut off comments at 4 years to help protect against spam, since a lot of it goes after older posts.

One final thing with the blog posts. You’ll want to mix your latest posts in with the marketing of all your other posts. The reason I start between 9:30 and 9:55 is that I set up my newest posts to go out between that time. I usually have new posts on Mondays and Thursdays for this blog and Tuesdays and Fridays for my business blog.

I want those to be my first posts of the day from my blogs. I will also schedule those posts again later in the day but with a hashtag, since Twitter won’t allow you to post the same exact thing in the same exact way more than once every 24 hours.

What this does for me is make it seem like I’m always around, which in a weird way I am. If I get comments on the links or someone retweets it, I get alerts on my smartphone and can check in if need be. I think that’s a big part of what’s helping, acknowledging people who share.

Earlier, I mentioned advertising my new book. What I did with that was create multiple marketing messages to share in a file, along with the link. I have 11 links, although they will be changing on Wednesday once I’ve finished marketing the package deal and it’s only the book. What I did initially was pop a link in every 2 hours in the half hour between the blog posts. In the other half hour I post motivational messages that I obtained from my business blog. Now I post the links in 4 hour increments, although for Tuesday I’ll probably post the links hourly since it’ll be the last time I use them in the format they’re in now. Those posts have been shared a lot, and since it’s always the same link I’m sure that’s helped my site gain a bit more traction.

There you go; that’s my process. Like I said, I’m not sure why Twitter isn’t driving as much traffic to my business blog as it is to my website, but I’ll figure it out one of these days. If you have any questions on all of this, or just want to share your opinion, go ahead and leave a comment. And above all, share! 🙂

Thanks for your great post about scheduling posts. I personally use Hootsuite to schedule my tweets and other social posts and i am quite satisfied with it. But as you mention about Tweetdeck, i would like to give it a try as well.

No problem Allan. I figure it’s a different strategy for people to check out that might work for them.

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